The Painstaking Redemption of The Elder Scrolls Online

It’s an odd thing, redemption. While many of us like to think we’d be afforded the opportunity to change public opinion of ourselves should we make a mistake, in practice we’re often rather reserved in dishing out such benevolence. Which is why it’s amazing to see the degree of forgiveness the famously hostile gaming community has displayed over the last few years. Upon launch, Diablo III was a mess – a real-money Auction House that completely undercut the purpose of the game, an always-online requirement that scuppered many potential players desire to get involved and myriad bugs combined to make the fastest-selling PC title of all time one of the most disappointing too.

But things didn’t stay this way. Blizzard pumped heaps of effort into addressing concerns and, with the release of the Reaper of Souls expansion and its subsequent patches, there’s no denying Diablo III is what it should have been from the start. It’s not the only developer to have made such a move either – the poster child for redemption in the MMO space is unquestionably Final Fantasy XIV, which continues to go from strength to strength in an increasingly hostile marketplace. Yet Final Fantasy XIV isn’t alone in this achievement - there’s another MMO that many wrote off rather quickly that, thanks to a complete redesign rendering it almost unrecognisable, is very much worth a second look.

Even in the run-up to the original launch of The Elder Scrolls Online, there were mutterings that it could never live up to Skyrim’s legacy.. Sure enough, when ESO went live it did so with more than its fair number of detractors. The MMO crowd felt they’d been lied to about how much interactive content there would be, while Elder Scrolls fans didn’t recognise this dead world as reminiscent of the ones they’d previously explored.

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We should have done a better job defining what it is and not let other people define it for us.

“I think really what we didn’t do a good job of was telling people what the game is,” explains game director Matt Firor when asked exactly where Zenimax Online went wrong. “Everyone knew it was like Skyrim, but it wasn’t – we simply needed to be clearer about saying exactly what it is. We started doing that later and saying don’t expect Skyrim, don’t expect EverQuest – this is its own thing and you can play it solo, which we definitely didn’t talk about enough. Everyone thought we were making this hardcore MMO and that’s simply not the case. It just has some MMO features. We should have done a better job defining what it is and not let other people define it for us.”

Of course, by the time this realisation came, it was too late. The perception of the game was sullied in the eyes of the masses, but there was no way Bethesda could afford to let one of its flagship brands be damaged in such a manner, especially given the incredible reception Skyrim enjoyed. So work began to turn things around.

First, it was decided the highly-anticipated Xbox One and PS4 editions of the game would be indefinitely postponed until the game was in the state more players expected. To figure out how to go about doing this, Firor and his team went back to the vocal community that had already tried out the PC version and found it wanting.

“We take feedback from the community very seriously,” he says. “That led us to some things like the world not feeling interactive enough, so that’s when we put in the ability to pick up armour and weapons you see lying around, or looting anything in any crate anywhere. It also led to the Justice System, where you can pickpocket and steal, more sandboxy stuff. Also redoing combat animations so it not only looks but also feels better and more visceral.

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We did an intensive internal beta. Bethesda is pretty big now, so we invited everyone in different studios around the world to jump in and play.

“We really wanted to fix a lot of the quests that have phasing in them. We really bought into the idea we need to make the player experience meaningful, which of course means being able to change the world. But when you’re playing with another player or trying to help a friend, you see different parts of the world. So we went back through every zone in the world, changed quests everywhere to remove phasing just for that. With a multiplayer game it’s more important to be able to play with the people you want to play with than it is to see the results of what you’re doing.”

All of this was the culmination of many months of hard work. Zenimax originally hoped to release the revamped Elder Scrolls Online experience by the end of 2014, though in the end this didn’t happen until halfway through 2015. The studio was adamant not to repeat past mistakes.

“It was the best thing that happened,” he says of the extra console delay. “To go those extra four or five months? It was essential. We had the game done in December but we didn’t want to have stupid little problems rear up so we wanted to test it well. So instead of launching we did an intensive internal beta. Bethesda is pretty big now, so we invited everyone in different studios around the world to jump in and play.”

With the relaunch looming imminent and an announcement about to be made, two decisions remained – first, what to call this new iteration of the game and second, should the decision be made to ditch the subscription fee? The latter was a contentious issue, not least because the introduction of in-game stores often comes with accusations of a pay-to-win culture, but for Firor and the rest of Zenimax the decision was pretty easy.

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One thing we thought we’d see was that casual players would gravitate to consoles while hardcore players would remain on PC. Totally not true.

“The buy-to-play thing was interesting because it came about more as a realisation of hey we fixed some problems, the game really is good, we’d love to sell it to lots of new players, but to do that we should actually get the players that have already played it back in and show them how it’s changed – make them into evangelists.

“The first day of Tamriel Unlimited we didn’t sell a lot of units, but our concurrency was three times that it had been before. Those were all original players coming back. Then, through word of mouth, it went on to sell very well and of course the console version just exploded.

“One thing we thought we’d see was that casual players would gravitate to consoles while hardcore players would remain on PC. Totally not true. Console players are just as hardcore. The PvP is a little different because you can talk all the time so communication is different in group situations, but other than that people play the hell out of the console and PC versions alike.”

As any decent MMO designer knows, however, launch is just the beginning – you’re only as good as your last update. With that in mind, it was during E3 this year that Zenimax announced plans to release one big DLC patch for The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited every three months. The first, available now, is the Imperial City. It provides Stalingrad-style PvP fighting in tight streets to compliment the open-field siege warfare of Cyrodil, along with two new dungeons and a narrative that concludes the Molag Bal storyline kicked off at level 1.

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The big lesson though is that for games of this type, you can fix problems and people will come back.

As for the future, Zenimax is planning to release Orsinium next, which sees us return to the Orc homeland to engage in story-based PvE exploration. Rounding out the first year of DLC will be the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood storylines.. Firor also teases our “favourite assassin character from the Ebonheart Pact may or may not make an appearance,” – so fans of Naryu Virian should be excited.

There’s much, much more planned beyond all this too, but Firor is reluctant to get too ahead of himself. There are plans for exploring the Argonian land of Blackmarsh, and also “a whole new Dwemer dungeon that’ll be awesome, which could actually be bigger than a dungeon,” alongside new characters, stories and arcs.

Despite all this being on the horizon, the lessons learned from the game’s brutal do-or-die transformation won’t be forgotten. Firor candidly admits there may be more mistakes made in future, but that doesn’t mean Zenimax is afraid. Far from it.

“The big lesson though is that for games of this type, you can fix problems and people will come back,” he says. “You have to make sure you’re always telling people what you’re doing, that you’re open and honest, but it shows you can hit the right notes – even if it takes a little longer than you thought, you can be redeemed.”

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.